I love boys! I feel so passionately that boys in our society are being failed and expected to behave like girls, but as a mother of 3 boys I want to bring mine up to be real men - strong, passionate risk takers. This blog is about our family's journey in raising our boys....

Saturday, 15 November 2014

Christmas adverts - sneaky marketing or Christmas spirit?

Since when was Christmas about sentimental adverts?

Don't get me wrong, I love Christmas. I enjoy spending time with family. I love the excited squeals as my boys open their presents. I enjoy the chocolate. And the rest of the food, of course.

But these adverts? They are a bizarre phenomenon to me. Sneaking their way into Christmas tradition with their clever marketing, they somehow have become part of our modern day advent. We all know Christmas is on the way when we see the soppy adverts populating our screens.

And do we really think that the big companies are just making these adverts so that we can enjoy Christmas more? Are they simply to add to the excitement of Christmas? Call me cynical, but they are out to make more money. They make these adverts to change the way we think about their products, so that we suddenly can't have Christmas without them despite the fact that we have managed pretty well without them for the rest of our lives.

We can all have a little smile and sigh at Monty the penguin, and we can feel nice on the inside about enemies playing football together, but I refuse to be sucked into their attempts to make themselves at home in my Christmas. They are what they are - adverts to encourage us to spend our money. No more, no less. And they may be sweetly perfumed, but to me they smell of the ugly whiff of consumerism which gobbles it's greedy way through our Christmases.